Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A Great War O.B.E. group of four awarded to Captain A. Smith, King’s Own Royal Royal Lancaster Regiment, who served as Member of Parliament for Clitheroe, Nelson and Colne

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, O.B.E. (Military) Officer’s 1st type breast badge, silver-gilt, hallmarks for London 1919; 1914-15 Star (Capt. A. Smith, R. Lanc. R.); British War and Victory Medals (Capt. A. Smith) gilding almost all rubbed from OBE, light contact marks, otherwise very fine (4) £200-£240

O.B.E. London Gazette 12 December 1919.

Albert Smith was born on 15 June 1867, and was first employed as a Mill boy at the age of 8. ‘From 1902 to 1912 he served on the Nelson Town Council and was Mayor of the Town from 1908 to 1910. In 1910 he succeeded Sir David J. Shackleton as M.P. for Clitheroe Division; however, his Parliamentary experience was interrupted by his voluntary enlistment in the Army in the first year of the Great War, and he had the distinction during the first few weeks of the war of being the only member of the Labour Party in Parliament to hold a commission in H.M. Forces. He saw active service as a Captain with the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment at Gallipoli, from where he was invalided home. For a time during the last war he was military representative in the Burnley Nelson and Colne area, but in 1917 he rejoined his battalion and finally left the Army on his completion of three years service. When the parliamentary borough of Nelson and Colne was formed in 1918, Captain Smith became its first M.P. He resigned in 1920, and subsequently served as a a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Lancashire for a good many years. He died at Nelson, Lancashire, in April 1942.’ (the recipient’s obituary from the Regimental Journal The Lion and the Rose, May 1942, refers).

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